The great Bronze Age power of Anatolia, ruling from Hattusa from roughly 1650 to 1180 BCE. One of the great powers of the Late Bronze Age Near East, alongside Egypt, Babylonia, Mitanni, and later Assyria, the Hittites were the speakers of the oldest written Indo-European language and the makers of the earliest surviving international peace treaty whose text is known in detail, sealed after the Battle of Kadesh. Their civilization was so completely forgotten that it had to be recovered by archaeology and decipherment in the modern age.
For most of recorded memory, the Hittites were a footnote. The Hebrew Bible named them a few times among the peoples of Canaan, and that was nearly all anyone knew. No ruins were tied to them, no language, no kings. Then in 1834 a French traveler reached a vast walled ruin in central Turkey, and over the following decades diggers pulled thousands of clay tablets from the ground. The tablets were written in cuneiform, the script of Mesopotamia, but the words underneath were strange. In 1915 a Czech scholar cracked the language and announced that it belonged to the same family as Latin, Greek, and English. A lost empire had been speaking to no one for three thousand years.